Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Nolan sisters

Got my loose filling sorted yesterday afternoon and was home nice and early for a change.

Hit the tables after dinner and decided to have a go at Pokerrooms $1nl full ring.Played a very tight game and watched as one particular villan raised preflop in almost every hand.$3 raise and I glance at my screen and see KK.I decide not to baffle myself with fancy plays and raise him to $8. Flop comes J Q 4 rainbow and I bet the pot and he calls with Q9 and hits another Q on the river.I check but stupidly call his $20 river bet.I thought he had AQ but that logic went out the window and while it would have been easy to steam about him calling my raise with Q9 I should still have folded when I knew I was beaten.

Moved to Interpoker $.50-$1nl 6 max and joined a table that had an average pot size of $28.Other tables had a $4.5 average so I reckoned this was the loosey goosey one to be at.That average was higher then most of the $1-$2 tables.

Anyway I sit down and buy in for $80 and notice the raising maniac straight away.Just joined so I'm unsure if he's on tilt or not but every hand is raised $11 preflop followed by at least a $20 post flop follow up bet.Great I think.Time to sit tight and make him pay when I hit hand.A couple of table orbits and he raises $11 again.I glance at my screen and there are the Nolan sisters ( glam UK equivalent of the Hiltons). Ok do I play 'em cool and just call letting the villan do the betting or is he fishy/tilty enough to call my raise?

From experience on this site I decide that theres no point in slow playing.I'm in the mood for dancing and as I'm fairly sure I've got the best hand when he reraises me I put him all in.I'm sitting with my full $80 stack in the middle and the moment our cards are flipped up seems to take forever.My QQ vAJ.Lets go fish boy I think.First card on the flop is an A and the rest are blanks.

Now I should be really fuming that this fish has dared to go all in for $80 with AJ but looking at the bigger picture I realised that if I could have seen his cards I would play it the same way every time.Now when fishboy caught his flush the other night at Pokerroom after calling without the right odds I wrote "nh" in the chat box hoping to encourage him along that road.Despite not fuming I couldn't quite bring myself to write the same after my QQ hand.I think he was tilting because of course he tightened up after that and I eventually found another table where I won $10 in 3/4 hr.

$10 is obviously buttons but I was pleased that all my internal promptings to myself about forgetting the past and focussing on the hand of the moment worked and I didn't steam.It is hard to treat every hand as a unique event unrelated to any other.I had a "one of those nights" type feeling and thats never good.I read that you should never play unless you have a positive expectation but when your opponent hits his pair on the river and calls your bluff which you know would have worked if it wasn't for that one card falling it can be hard to remain positive.

There's no way I could allow myself to tilt.If I'm going to look for loose tables I'm not about to tilt at the first sign of a bad beat.No way Jose.